Kafka + AWS lambda

Question

Is it possible to integrate AWS Lambda with Apache Kafka ? I want to put a consumer in a lambda function. When a consumer receive a message the lambda function execute.

Answer 1

Continuing the point by Arafat. We have successfully built an infrastructure to consume from Kafka using AWS Lambdas. Here are some gotcha's:

• Make sure to consistently batch and commit while reading when consuming.
• If you are storing the batches to s3, make sure to clean your file descriptors.
• If you are forwarding the batches to another service make sure to clean the variables. Variable caching in AWS Lambda might result in memory overflows.
• A good idea is to check how much time you have left while from the context object in the Lambda and give yourself some wiggle room to do something with the buffer you populated in your consumer which might not be read to a file unless you call close().

We are using Apache Airflow for scheduling. I hear cloudwatch can do that too.

Answer 2

Here is AWS article on scheduled lambdas.

Given your Kafka installation will be running in a VPC, best practise is to configure your Lambda to run within the VPC as well - this will simplify the security group configuration for the EC2 instances running Kafka.

Here is the AWS blog article on configuring Lambdas to run in a VPC.